Aristo of Pella

Ante-Nicene Fragments and Minor Writers · the ante-Nicene period

Aristo of Pella

From the Disputation of Jason and Papiscus. “I remember,” says Jerome (Comm. ad Gal., cap. iii. comm. 13), “in the Dispute between Jason and Papiscus, which is composed in Greek, to have found it written: ‘The execration of God is he that is hanged.’” Jerome likewise, in his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, says: “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth. The majority believe, as it is affirmed also in the Dispute between Jason and Papiscus, and as Tertullian in his book Against Praxeas contends, and as Hilarius too, in his exposition of one of the Psalms, declares, that in the Hebrew it is: ‘In the Son, God made the heaven and the earth.’ But that this is false, the nature of the case itself proves.” Perhaps from the Same Work. …And when the man himself who had instigated them to this folly had paid the just penalty (says Eusebius, Hist., iv. 6), “the whole nation from that time was strictly forbidden to set foot on the region about Jerusalem, by the formal decree and enactment of Adrian, who commanded that they should not even from a distance look on their native soil!” So writes Aristo of Pella. I have found this expression Seven heavens (says Maximus, in Scholia on the work concerning the Mystical Theology, ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, cap. i.) also in the Dispute between Papiscus and Jason, written by Aristo of Pella, which Clement of Alexandria, in the sixth book of the Outlines, says was composed by Saint Luke.

Concerning the Same Work. Thus writes Origen:…in which book a Christian is represented disputing with a Jew from the Jewish Scriptures, and showing that the prophecies concerning the Christ apply to Jesus: although his opponent addresses himself to the argument with no common ability, and in a manner not unbefitting his Jewish character. ————————————